In IT we're used to having a buzzword every now and then. Most technicians just continue doing what they're good at and maintain and upgrade their infrastructure in a manner only they can, as they now how the company is serviced in the best way possible, with the available funds and resources.

As a succesor to the cloud buzzword we now have software defined everything. Software Defined DataCenter (SDDC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and so on. And although I don't like buzzwords, there is a bigger meaning behind Software Defined Everything.

When looking at the present DataCenter you can see that the evolution of hardware has been very impressive. CPU, Storage, RAM and Network have evolved to a stage where software seems to have become the bottleneck. That's where Software Defined Everything comes into the picture, making the software that will use the potential of the hardware. My only point is that everything should be "Software" defined is bypassing everything the hardware vendors have done , and will continue doing, which is a tremendous amount of hard work, research and development to give us the Datacenter possibilties we have today. So naming it "software defined" is wrong if you ask me.

Looking at Storage there is a lot of great storage software to leverage the just as great storage hardware. Looking at some of the Solarwinds Storage Manager features like:

Heterogeneous Storage Management

Storage Performance Monitoring

Automated Storage Capacity Planning

VM to Physical Storage Mapping

You can see hoq software uses the hardware to provide the technician the tools they need to manage their datacenter, and giving the customer the IT they need. In future posts I would like to go deeper in some of these features, but for now I just wanted to share my thoughts on why software is an extension to hardware AND the other way around. You’re more then welcome to disagree, and leave your view in the comments.